It's made by a team at Google called Ingress. The game is pretty fun, I've been playing it in the Seattle area as a member of the "resistance". Give it shot if you can, might need to sign up for an invite though. I'll let you all know when I get some invites.

Looks like just the map. The game happens partially in the real world, partially in VR.
The actual game info is at http://www.ingress.com ; the stuff at niantic is just some of the "current story" or somesuch.

Ingress ﾗ an augmented reality multi-player game (Android only for now) that uses Googleﾒs mapping and local data assets to connect the online and offline worlds in a JJ Abramsesque alternate reality. Itﾒs incredibly ambitious and global in scope.
It contemplates people playing simultaneously in cities around the world. The game is in closed beta right now but it already has thousands of players in numerous countries.
[...]
I asked Hanke if Google was really serious about Ingress as a game or whether it was a lavish test of something else. Hanke said Google was genuinely serious and wanted to make the game as engaging as possible.
The larger objective is two-fold: get people off the couch and exploring their cites and eventually other cities. (This is also an objective of another Google-Niantic app: Field Trip.) The other ﾓmeta goalﾔ is to encourage people to collaborate and cooperate in the playing of the game locally and around the world.
Ingress uses all the geo-capabilities of the phone and overlays the alternate reality onto real places.
Ingress is not the first game to use augmented reality in the ﾓreal world,ﾔ but itﾒs probably the most refined and ambitious one to date. Hanke said that eventually Google may make APIs available so that other developers could build augmented reality games on top of Google Maps and other data.

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<a href="/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003K0m&msg_id=003K0m">An Interesting MMO you play with your phone.</a>